


Cinderella Story

by kototyph



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alcohol, Bureaucracy, Crack Treated Seriously, Espionage, M/M, Personal Ads, Post-Iron Man 1, Pre-Thor (2011), Senior Agents Behaving Badly, Sexual Harassment, Undercover, geopolitics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-04
Updated: 2018-03-04
Packaged: 2019-03-27 03:28:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,973
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13872147
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kototyph/pseuds/kototyph
Summary: “Well, where do you find anything these days?” Hill asks, with all the gravitas afforded her by the tiny pink umbrella stuck in her bun.“Ebay,” Blake says.“Abottobad,” Hand offers.“Craigslist,” Hill corrects them, and throws back her twelfth Rocky Mountain Bearfucker.





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> aka the dick pic fic that's been brewing yeastily in my WIPs folder for, like, two years. I don't quite have the last two chapters ironed out, but I need some motivation to work on them so here you go

“For your situational awareness,” Phil says, a three-dollar Long Island in each hand, “these are mine. Go get your own goddamn drinks.”

Blake scowls blearily at him. “Well, fuck you very much.”

“Cheers,” Phil says. “Now move over.”

Blake staggers to his feet instead, and nearly capsizes the booth’s table as he goes. “Fuck _you_ ,” he says again, waving an unsteady hand at Phil. “Asshole. ‘M getting a beer.”

May pushes an empty pitcher after him. “You’re getting us all beer,” she says, pointing at the smudged specials sign above the bar. “Or— margaritas. Yeah, margaritas. We’ve already had the mango, get strawberry.”

Blake flips her off but takes the pitcher, and gets swallowed by the crush of drunk coeds between their table and the bar before he’s taken two wobbling steps. Phil steals his spot without a second’s hesitation, easing into the seat with a crackle in his spine like popcorn or a solid hit from a stun baton. God, he feels old _._

“You’re late,” Hill says, eyeing him over a lopsided cairn of shot glasses. “Even later than you usually are.”

Next to her, May settles her head on a hand. “Got caught up in something?”

“I’m not talking to either of you before I’ve had both of these,” Phil decides, and applies himself to the first with grim determination. It tastes like it’s half gasoline and all ulcer and he is going to hate, _hate_ himself tomorrow morning, but that’s what these little excursions are all about: exhaustion, regret, and the temporary indulgence of self-destructive tendencies.

“Hear, hear,” he mumbles into his glass, and ignores Hill’s raised eyebrows.

The glass is down by two thirds when Victoria Hand coalesces beside the table, curly straw sunk deep in a plastic fishbowl full of Mai Tai. There are dark circles under her eyes and a weary pinch to her mouth. “Scootch,” she orders. Phil scootches, or tries to, impeded by a pile of raincoats and purses. Hand perches gloomily on what’s left.

“You made it,” May says, tilting her glass. “Welcome to our club.”

“The District shithole touring club?” Hand asks around her straw, followed by a noisy slurp. “This place was a gross old dump when _I_ was in college.”

“Mm, exactly,” Hill says. “Only the best for Fuck Me Fridays.”

“Every Friday is Fuck Me Friday,” Hand says darkly.

“Amen to that,” Hill says, and raises another shotglass high. “Fuck everything!”

“Fuck everything,” they all groan, and drink.

Phil finishes the Long Island and pushes it aside with a heartfelt sigh, closing his eyes to better appreciate the blunt-instrument approach to relaxation. He can feel his muscles start to unclench, one by one until the only thing holding him upright is the hand braced under his chin. If it wasn’t for the top-forty pop throbbing in his ears and an aftertaste reminiscent of lighter fluid, he could almost pretend he was enjoying himself.

“Coulson?”

“Not yet,” he says, patting around for the next one. He doesn’t bother opening his eyes. “Come back in ten.”

“Fine, fine.”

Blake manages to crawl back eventually, and Hand moves over to make room for him. Phil allows himself to be further subsumed by the coat pile. The conversation at the table continues without him, something about Blue Line maintenance and wondering if they’ll see a repeat of last year’s Snowmageddon this winter.

 _No shop talk_ is the first rule of Fuck Me Friday, which means the things they do discuss tend towards the inane and ridiculous. None of them have a life outside of SHIELD; no pets, no kids, no canasta clubs. Blake took up sailing for as long as it took them to find that mutant bullshark in the Potomac, and Hill has been banned from every dojo within a hundred miles of the Beltway. Phil had a houseplant once, in the early aughts. He’d used its dead, dry husk to incapacitate a fugitive NSA agent who’d been hiding in his apartment for nine days, waiting for him to come home.

It’s a new decade, and Phil has a nicer place and better security, but he sees that apartment even less than the old one. His beautiful Lola has been languishing in storage for more than a year; by no coincidence, he hasn’t gotten laid in about as long. He’s missed his last three bids on eBay for the 1976 run of Howling Commando foil cards because of surprise missions in the Andean, Rocky, and Pamir mountains respectively. He takes his time with the second drink because he has nothing to talk about that isn’t embarrassingly dull or highly classified. None of them do. Hence the terrible cocktails, the terrible bars— on a randomized rotating schedule governed by the same selection process they use for safehouses— and the terrible, terrible conversation.

Case in point: virtually the moment his straw starts sucking air, Hill and Hand are on him, dragging him into an impassioned discussion over the rise of the useless belt trend and its ability to disguise hip holsters. Tortuous minutes later, this has blended into the comparative usefulness of the long-dress-flat-boots trend, boho headbands, and liquid leggings. After Blake tries to turn the conversation to the economy, then Qaddafi’s death, he’s unanimously banished from the table again to get a fifth refill of the margarita pitcher.

“I don’t _know_ ,” Phil grumbles when asked his opinion on a pair of floral-print shorts plastered to the ass of a skinny kid losing his mind to Adele and lets his head fall on his folded arms. The young confuse him, all their glowsticks and face-spaces and asymmetrical haircuts. “Maybe he just likes flowers. Maybe he thinks that girl he’s climbing on likes flowers. Maybe he’s trying to get a hook-up.”

“ _Get a hook-up,”_ May says mockingly.

“You,” Hill says, prodding Phil in the forehead. “You are a sad old man who doesn’t even know the slang anymore. _You_ need a hook-up.”

Phil doesn’t bother denying it, or lifting his head from his arms. It’s quite comfortable here, actually. Nice and dark. “And you need to stop drinking those awful shots. What are they called? Bear knockers?”

“Forget Coulson, he’s hopeless. _I_ need a hook-up,” May mutters, and when Phil’s eyes crack open she’s gazing at out at the bar with a speculative stare. “There has to be someone in this beery mess worth dancing with.”

“Are you sure?” Blake says as he drops onto the sticky wooden bench. “Is this crowd young enough for you?”

There’s a thump from under the table and he yelps. May smirks at him. “Why? Are you volunteering?”

“ _No_ ,” Blake says, shoving the refilled pitcher across the table. Electric blue slush dribbles down the sides and puddles around the sweating base. “Never again.”

“ _Again_?” Hill asks with delighted disgust.

“Like you’ve never made decisions you regret after all the blood washes off,” May says dismissively as she pours. She turns her eyes back on the crowd, narrowed and predatory.

“Meilnda, I’m saying this because I love you,” Hill tells her, setting another shotglass aside. “That face scares all the boys away.”

Something catches May’s eye, and draws her lips into a wicked curve. “Not that boy, I bet,” she says, and hops off her seat.

Phil watches her disappear into the melee on the dance floor with a kind of forlorn envy, exacerbated by the sick burn in his stomach and the haze settling over his brain. “I want one,” he says, a bit nonsensically.

Not nonsensically enough. Hill gives him a pitying look and pats his arm. Blake, known throughout the agency as an asshole’s asshole, just snorts and says, “Good fucking luck with that. Where are you going to find someone willing to put up with SHIELD’s shit, on top of whatever other crap you bring to the table personally?”

“Well, where do you find anything these days?” Hill asks, with all the gravitas afforded her by the tiny pink umbrella stuck in her bun.

“Ebay,” Blake says.

“Abottobad,” Hand offers.

“Craigslist,” Hill corrects them, and throws back her twelfth Rocky Mountain Bearfucker.

* * *

SHIELD has its own makeshift forum of sorts on the DC Craigslist page, written heavily in code and appearing mostly in the ‘death & dying’ and ‘std info’ community stubs. This particular post falls firmly in the latter category.

**_vsa rqst 20110913 SF-69/etc_ **

_pics pls_

_+12026475555 / IVG 6472889_

_your SOs need love too_


	2. 2

_Bzzzzzzzzzz._

Phil wakes up hunched around the pit of barbed wire and nausea that is his digestive system, fully dressed and with absolutely no memory of getting home. If he is home. For an indefinite period of suffering, he’s not exactly sure; it takes a while for his eyes to come unstuck, and a little longer to realize he’s lost a contact lens when the room refuses to come into focus on the left.

_Bzzzzzzzzzz._

The senior agent duty phone is lying on the bed next to him, a post-it note stuck to the screen. While he watches, it buzzes again, and Phil rubs a tired hand over his face before rolling onto his shoulder to reach for it. He misses, naturally, and knocks the phone straight into the crevice between the mattress and the wall. _“No,”_ he moans, grabbing after it, “oh God, no,” and manages to push it all the way down to the floor. The buzzing is even louder against the wood.

“This’d better be the Fridge,” Phil grits out as he strains to reach it, feeling along the baseboard underneath the bed. He’s sweating in his wool suit and shoes, and the pain in his temples is _excruciating._ It starts to stab in time with his heartbeat as his fingers finally, finally brush plastic. “The missile silos’d— better be _compromised_ and the world of the verge of, _damn it,_ of thermonuclear holocaust—”

Two fingertips and he manages to snag the damn thing. Phil carefully levers it up to the point where he can see the slightly crumpled post-it.

_Tag, your shift! XOXO —Hill_ , says the cheery looping scrawl.

“No,” he grumbles, ripping it off and jabbing in the first and second passcodes. “No, it is _not_ my shift, not for— _for fourteen more hours_ , damn it all, can none of you people read a roster?”

The source of the buzzing is a text message, and he prods at the accept button impatiently.

The text message says, _Reporting for duty ;),_ which he’s going to ignore for his headache’s sake.

Attached is a photo. He prods that too.

The photo is, only and inexplicably, a close-up of a fully erect penis.

Phil blinks. Squints.

No, it’s—

—it’s definitely a dick.

Half blind and barely awake, his sluggish mind fills with a long and wordless stream of question marks while he stares at the badly-lit image, no face or much body at all visible beyond the obvious. It’s an extended amount of time before any of those question marks have actual thoughts in front of them.

Someone… someone has sent a photo of their dick. To the level seven duty phone. Level seven. A photo of a dick, which someone has taken using SHIELD tech. Inside the firewall, to get more than text through. Taken and presumably sent on purpose, in compos mentis, to their superior officer on duty. Winky face. Reporting for duty. A dick.

It’s... a nice dick? Objectively. If he wasn’t so hungover and this wasn’t the _duty phone_. It’s visibly flushed and gleaming-wet at the tip even in the bad lighting, framed by muscled thighs and strong-looking, scarred fingers.

However, hangover. Duty phone. _Dick._

“What,” Phil says finally.

The phone buzzes again, and a new message with attached photo appears. He hesitates, then slowly taps the screen.

The new photo is also of a dick, although this one is made of purple silicon and protrudes from a harness and someone’s slick fist.

“ _What.”_

There are twenty-three unopened text messages waiting for his review, all of which appear to have attachments. Phil stares at them, and they seem to stare back, daring him to hope for one solitary second that they aren’t exactly what he thinks they are. His headache is reaching dangerous, potentially lethal proportions.

The senior agent duty phone’s number is known to a limited pool of people in SHIELD, which in turn signifies that these messages are to a man— to a _dick_ from SHIELD agents Level Six and above. His agents.  Phil wonders, for an absurd moment, if this is this somehow mission related. It could be code. There actually is a standardized selfie code, created for the Instagram craze and designed to take advantage of situations where arty shots of plates and ducklips were safer and less conspicuous than a phone call. They teach it as part of the equipment module in basic.

Phil does not recall dick pics being part of the curriculum.

The phone buzzes.

His eyes narrow.

* * *

“ _Oh God, I think I’m dying,”_ Hill rasps at him through the phone. His personal phone, not the duty phone. _That_ is lying a safe distance away, facedown on the yellowing newspapers that cover his coffee table. _“I think my liver is trying to stab me to death from the inside. Who do I see in Medical about homicidal organs?”_

“For a liver? Definitely Gregson,” Phil rasps back. After a fraught battle with his abused body, he’s made it as far as the couch, a cold bottle of water chilling his fingers and a pillow blocking most of the light. “He’s a hepatologist and has training in couples counseling. That’s not why I called.”

_“Christ, Phil, it’s half a day,”_ she groans. _“Just take the goddamn phone. I need sleep, I can’t keep talking Sitwell down from killing your team every two hours.”_

“Delta isn’t mine.” Technically true. They aren’t his the same way the alley cats behind the building aren’t his; he just feeds them occasionally and makes sure they have a warm place to sleep in the winter.

Hill must be thinking something similar. “ _Sure they aren’t. They just followed you home, honest.”_

“Hill,” he says patiently, “I didn’t call to talk about Delta.”

_“What, then?”_

There’s no delicate way to put it, really. “Why are there over thirty explicit photo messages on the duty phone?”

There’s a lengthy, weighted pause on her end.

_“Explicit...?”_

“Sexually explicit.”

_“As in…”_

“As in many more exposed genitalia and sex acts than I was prepared to witness while still recovering from last night,” he says.

_“Huh.”_

“Huh?”

_“I didn’t think we’d actually done that.”_

Under the pillow, Phil squeezes his eyes shut. “Done what, exactly?”

_“You don’t remember?”_

“Obviously not.”

_“We… in the cab back from G-town. We might have put up a post, uh, asking for pictures. Did you say thirty?”_

The duty phone buzzes, and Phil sighs and reaches for the water. “Thirty six.”

_“That’s… hm. Actually a little impressive,”_ Hill says.

Phil tips the pillow up just enough to take a careful sip, then sets the bottle on the floor. “Maria. Why.”

There’s a shuffling noise on her end of the line, and a loud uninhibited groan. _“Fu-u-uck. Uh. I think… you said you needed more dick in your life? And I agreed with you. And then we made it general because Blake said we were discriminating against people who needed more pussy, and Hand agreed with him.”_

“And we decided to use the _duty number?”_ he says, crushing the pillow to his face with both hands. “ _Maria.”_

_“I am never getting that drunk again,”_ Hill says fervently.

Phil gives a cynical half-laugh and immediately regrets it as his stomach cramps. “That’s what we say every goddamn Friday.”

* * *

They delete the post with prejudice and data-devouring malware, but the messages don’t stop. Sunday comes and they actually seem to be gathering momentum, thirty becoming fifty becoming eighty. There’s a surreal moment on Monday when the duty phone chirps and Phil has to say “I’m sorry, I need to take this,” to Fury and _the president of these United States_ , and step outside to stare with fruitless angst at the single longest ballsack he has ever seen.

“... are you going to get that, Agent Coulson?” their chief budget officer asks on Tuesday, after the phone buzzes for three straight minutes. Phil gives her the blandest smile he can manage as he picks it up.

“If you’ll excuse me,” he says, and tilts the screen away so the poor woman isn’t subjected to the same arched back and spread labia that assault his eyes the next second.

Wednesday, Fury calls him into his office to laugh at him.

“I wondered why you were so twitchy this week,” the man says with a broad grin, scrolling through the phone with the sparkling gleam of schadenfreude in his eye. “Damn _._ That is the _single longest—_ ”

“Sir,” Phil says evenly, “I realize that we were inexcusably unprofessional, and I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize—”

“Damn straight this is unprofessional,” Fury says, still scrolling. “Give out your work numbers, fine, sometimes our contacts need them. Those are disposable, we’ve got a stack of SIM cards a mile high in Requisitions. The duty number, though. That’s an altogether different animal.”

“Yes, sir, and—”

“Can’t just change it. We’ve got hundreds of agents out there right now with it burned into their brain as their last line of contact.” Fury looks over the top of the phone at him. “And, apparently, at least a hundred agents who thought it was a great idea to send the duty officer pictures of their business. Pretty unprofessional all around, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, sir, and I was—”

“I’m a fair man, Phil,” Fury says, and sets the phone at the edge of the desk. “I recognize this is an isolated incident in the otherwise stellar records of four of my best, and that it will _never happen again_.”

Fury stares him down, and Phil tries to moderate the amount of enthusiasm in his nod.

“Then I don’t see a need for formal disciplinary action.”

“Sir,” Phil starts, and Fury holds up a finger.

“But.”

Phil swallows. “Yes, sir?”

Fury smiles, a cat with a mouse by the tail, and taps the phone screen. “These kids here, Phil? They haven’t earned that from me. Which is why you’ll be identifying and citing all one hundred—” The phone buzzes. “—and one of these morons for misuse of SHIELD-issue communications equipment.”

Phil stares at him in mute horror.

“I hope we understand each other.”

“Yes, sir,” Phil says hollowly.

“Then you’re dismissed, agent,” Fury announces with an air of deep satisfaction, settling back in his chair and steepling his fingers. “And Phil?”

“Yes, sir?”

Fury’s toothy smile widens. “Grab my deputy for me on your way out?”

* * *

Hill won’t help Phil, and won’t tell him what Fury has her doing instead. When he asks, she just shudders and says, “You’re still on file as my kaishakunin, right? I’ll let you know if I need you.”

Phil doesn’t even get as far as asking with Hand, who raises a single eyebrow and just _looks_ at him until he backs out of her office murmuring, “Glad we had this talk. I’ll see myself out.”

Blake’s gone undercover in a Benin poaching ring, the bastard.

_“Not my circus, not my monkeys,”_ May says in Polish when he finally catches her on the phone. _“Unlike the rest of you sorry assholes, I was getting some, remember?”_

“But—”

_“Oh, look, there’s the target,”_ she says, and hangs up on him.

The week rolls on. The pictures keep coming. By Friday, because he’s a goddamn professional and does his job even when it’s personally and hideously humiliating, Phil has cited forty agents using SHIELD’s massive network of somatic recognition softwares, and another twenty-two by matching tattoos and scars to personnel files. The surveillance analysts and HR specialists are starting to avoid his eyes in the hallways, and Phil dies a little inside each time it happens. The director’s ability to drive home his point is, in a word, masterful.

That afternoon, Delta returns from Kaliningrad in a flurry of equipment-loss paperwork and Clint’s fingers in splints. Sitwell doesn’t bother asking if Phil is willing to sit review, just drops a wad of mud-spattered hotel notepads and what looks like half a license plate on his desk and says, “Fuck this, I’m transferring to Kiribati.”

“Aren’t you allergic to coconuts?” Clint asks idly, already sprawled sideways in one of Phil’s chairs. Sitwell gives Phil a look dripping in pathos and departs with a door slam.

Natasha sits upright and motionless as they start the debrief, and Phil can feel the quiet, seething tension she has when a mission collapses without resolution like an electric charge in the air. Half an hour in, he aims a flat look at her over the tattered pages of their medical forms, which she returns with interest.

“Run it off, sleep it off, I don’t care,” he says, tapping the edges on his desk. “Come back and report when you can handle it.”

She nods once, briskly, and as she leaves Clint jumps to his feet to go after her. “Great idea,” he says, “I’ll just—”

“Sit,” Phil says mildly, setting the forms aside. “I for one am very interested to hear why your cause of injury is listed as _blackjack.”_

Clint grins uneasily. “Nat’s a sore loser?”

At Phil’s elbow, the duty phone buzzes.

“Oh, hey, you should get that,” Clint tries, inching backwards over the threshold. “Really. It’s probably very important, and confidential, I’m just going to—”

“Sit. Down,” Phil says through his teeth. “Now.”

Wide-eyed, Clint slinks back into the room to his chair while Phil shuts his eyes briefly, and hits accept.

Well. He’s never seen _that_ pierced before.

“Boss?” Clint’s perched on the back of the chair, feet on the armrests, eyeing him worriedly. “Is Sitwell still giving you shit? Because, honestly, if he can’t take a little joke—”

“Agent Barton,” Phil says, suddenly very, very tired. “I’d like you to describe the events that led to the injury, again, in your own words. Start with the paragraph of your written report that mentions ‘Spetnaz floozies’, please.”


	3. 3

By unspoken agreement, none of the shithole touring club still in DC suggest an outing that night— except for Sitwell, who pouts too damn much about “missing the action” for a grown man who has been made well aware of the consequences. Phil goes home to contemplate the contents of his freezer vice the nutritional guidelines laid down during his last physical like START treaty obligations, and manages to find some shaky middle ground in the spinach alfredo. CNN dissects the Standard & Poor downgrade and Mubarak’s trial while Phil slowly falls asleep in his microwaved pasta, thinking almost-fond thoughts of MREs past. At least they hadn’t tried to keep them low-sodium in the Rangers.

On Saturday, Phil has a neat, almost surgical spike of pain lodged in his lower back and fresh hatred for the bland, boxy armchairs that came with the apartment. He goes for a physio-approved run in the watery September sunlight and feels almost human by the time he limps into the shower and starts getting ready for work.

It’s a quick drive, Jefferson Davis stretching empty all the way from Alexandria onwards and the Pentagon’s parking lot near-deserted as he cruises by. The Triskelion isn’t much better, even the frenetic floors of Ops unusually quiet and still. Phil badges in at three different doors and leaves his work cell and personal phone in cubbies at the last. The duty phone he habitually leaves with the officer on guard, who has instructions to dial his office line if anything comes through.

Natasha is sitting on the guard’s desk, legs crossed at the ankles and a small smile for the woman’s low-pitched and giggling aside as Phil comes to a stop in front of them.

“Morning, Agent Coulson,” the guard says too brightly. There’s a paper cup from a gourmet coffee place that just opened in Rosslyn in her hand.

“Sorry, Coulson,” Natasha says, lifting an identical cup to her lips. “If I’d known you were coming in, I would have picked up another one.”

Phil eyes the coffee with dull envy. While caffeine is technically _in_ the nutritional guidelines, it is not listed on the acceptable side of the equation. “Afternoon, Sergeant Brown. Agent.”

He hands over the phone and Natasha says, “See you,” to the guard, slipping off the desk and stalking after Phil at her own leisurely pace. Phil looks over his shoulder with a raised eyebrow.

“I haven’t given my report,” she says.

“That’s true.”

“I miss your face.”

“That’s probably not.”

She grins at him. “I heard you fined Lance Hunter for a _very_ personal piercing.”

Phil doesn’t satisfy her with a groan, but he does close his eyes briefly as they continue down the hallway. “It wasn’t the piercing, as I’m sure you know by now.”

“Oh, I know,” Natasha confirms. “I want to see the rest of the photos.”

Phil looks up at the ceiling tiles for guidance, while Natasha eels past him to insinuate herself into a chair. The lights flicker on belatedly, illuminating the bristling pinboards and overflowing desk. He slowly follows her in; stale air and windowless rooms are the tradeoffs they make for secure work spaces, but there’s something particularly depressing about coming back to the same beige walls and overly ergonomic desk chair less than eight hours after leaving, knowing you’ll be there for at least another twelve.

“I’m going to assume this isn’t to satisfy prurient interest, which still leaves a number of options I’m not comfortable with,” Phil says as he hangs up his coat.

Natasha pats the desk in front of her invitingly. “Don’t be like that. I can probably get least a third of them out of the way for you.”

“Bold claim. Also, that would be divulging personally identifiable information to an uninvolved third party.”

“And I’m sure you have at least ten forms for involving third parties. Bottom drawer, left side?”

“Nice try.” They were in the bottom drawer on the right side, in between the time and attendance sheets and various flavors of incident report. Not that she should know anything about it.

“Coulson,” she says, sincerity too thick to be anything but a lie. “Help me help you.”

Phil snorts despite himself, and goes around the desk. He raises his eyebrows when Natasha immediately leans in over the stacks of files with an expectant look, and deliberately turns away to the keyboard. “Help me wrap up the op review, and we’ll talk,” he says.

“Sitwell hates the Baltics,” she says promptly. “The feeling is mutual. He got us stonewalled by every possible lead until we were dead in the water, then wouldn’t call it until Clint was bored enough to force the issue and nearly blew our cover and the safehouse to hell gambling with GRU agents.”

Phil stops typing in the middle of his 45-character password. “Confirmed agents?”

“Named, known agents. Fury should keep Sitwell in the Middle East, it’s the only thing he knows how to do,” she says. “Also, he’s going to pitch bringing your Maurice Altier cover out of retirement for the next phase of the mission.” She smiles, winsome and remorseless. “I might have made a suggestion or two when he threatened to ground us until spring.”

Phil lifts his fingers off the keys and steeples them in front of his face. Natasha nudges the mouse towards him.

“Go on. Write that up. I’ll tell you when his meeting with Hill is after we’re done.”

“Do you have any idea how difficult it is to sound like a Russian trying to pass as an Estonian reinventing himself as a Swiss financier? _”_ Phil asks her. “Any at all?”

“Child’s play, _daragoi,_ ” she says, all rounded Piter vowels. “I don’t have all day, you know.”

Phil writes up the goddamn mission and submits it, knowing it’ll be back in his inbox in less than twenty-four hours with a request for reassessment, and when Natasha holds out her hand and looks at him expectantly he stoops and pulls out a DS-1880. “I’d like to note for the room that this is blackmail,” he says, sliding it over.

“Please, the only bugs in here are Fury’s and he thinks it’s funny,” Natasha says, signing with an extravagant swirl. “There. Let’s see them.”

He pulls up the files in their carefully segregated folder, angles the monitor and surrenders the mouse to her tender mercies. It’s a while before Natasha speaks again, staring at the various contortions and sex toys in narrow-eyed concentration. She clicks rapidly through the library of fifty-odd remaining photos all the way to the end, then goes back to the beginning and spends enough time on each that Phil opens a thick brief on CENTCOM’s leadership struggles and settles in.

“Thomas, from the Arctic division,” she says eventually. Phil glances up and sees she’s stopped on a perfectly anodyne white dick. “Don’t know his last name.” Click, click, cock cage. “Klahan Aromdee, in counterterrorism.” Click, click, intimidatingly large strap-on. “Bobbi.” Click. “Probably Bobbi’s girlfriend, she’s with the DNI. Same lampshade in the background.” Click, click, click. “I think this one is Bernard Schlitz, he’s on nonpro in Tehran. He’s supposed to have one of the longest—”

“Let’s see if we can corroborate those four first,” Phil says, and he’s unsurprised that they manage to settle on them, Bernard, and an additional eighteen with a combination of Natasha’s observational skills and preternaturally good guesses.

It’s a few minutes after four in the afternoon when he finishes writing a citation for a bondage shot that frankly just looks ridiculous and says, “Anything else?”

She points. “This one is me.”

It’s a tasteful, almost artistic silhouette, with the barest hint of breast and bared shoulder. Phil slants her a sideways look. “Agent Barton wasn’t the only one who was bored.”

“I thought Deputy Director Hill was still on duty,” she says with a shrug, already scrolling again. “Ah.”

She’s stopped on a photo he’s all but memorized, at this point: the nice dick photo, as he’s been privately calling it. The one he’d first woken up to.

“What?” Phil asks.

She doesn’t say anything, eyes narrowing slightly. “I think,” she says, then begins clicking rapidly forward through the folder to another photo. This one is barely obscene at all, lowslung uniform pants and the sharp cut of one hip leading the eye downwards. “These two. Same person.”

Phil leans forward, studying the images. Natasha obligingly flicks back and forth between screens.

“... I’m not seeing it,” he admits, after a few absorbed seconds. It’s still a very nice dick. “When was the second sent?”

“Yesterday. It’s the most recent one to arrive,” she says. “Hm.”

It’s the epitome of noncommittal, but Phil looks at her sharply. “Who is it?”

She blinks at the computer, head tilting slowly to the side. Finally, she says, “I don’t feel comfortable speculating at this time.”

Phil eyes her, then the photo, wondering what he’s missing. “Is that so.”

She just smiles at him. “If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.”

“Thank you for your assistance, agent,” Phil says with a sour edge.

Natasha glances at the two shots and back at Phil, a strange gleam entering her eye. “Oh, Coulson,” she says, “it was my pleasure. Sitwell’s meeting started thirteen minutes ago.”

Phil doesn’t bother swearing, but he does swipe Natasha’s lukewarm coffee as he departs the office at speed.

* * *

Considering the enormous fuckup Delta’s just made under Sitwell’s leadership, Phil is fairly certain that Hill will laugh him and the idea of resurrecting Maurice Altier out of her office, out of the building, and maybe all the way out to Kiribati. He still crashes the meeting, makes a point of having a longer, louder counter for every argument Sitwell tries, and leaves only when he has the reassuring heat of Sitwell’s glare burning a hole in his suitjacket. When he gets back to his office, Natasha is gone but Sergeant Brown is hovering anxiously at his desk to tell him there’s a new message on the duty phone.

It is, thank all the saints, Blake with a tipoff that the operation in Benin is accelerating beyond total clusterfuck into supernova territory. The West Africa division chief has just taken off from Stuttgart and Phil is happily and totally occupied for the next nine hours until she lands and can pry the situation from his cramping, sleep-deprived fingers.

“Go home, Agent Coulson,” she tells him, still in milair grunge. “Wait. Don’t go home, you probably drove. Is Delta in town?” she asks the skeleton crew supporting Phil. Her own team is starting to file in, swapping out roles and stations with the officers he’d managed to pull from the Ops tank downstairs and around the building.

Before he can protest that just like Delta is not his, _he is not Delta’s,_ Clint says, “Present.”

Phil slowly turns and sees him sitting directly behind the command chair, at a console decorated with three empty Gatorade bottles and an enormous, half-eaten bag of caramel corn. Phil had had some of that caramel corn, but he hadn’t noticed Clint; further proof Hawkeye could be a frighteningly competent agent when it suited him.

“Please escort Agent Coulson out of my control room and directly to the nearest horizontal surface,” she says. “We’ll take it from here.”

Phil puts a hand to his headset, still eyeing Clint; the man rolls to his feet with an acrobat’s grace and stretches extravagantly. “You hear that, Porto-Novo? Chief Ibrahim is here and taking over.”

“ _Shit. Copy that,_ ” Blake says. “ _Tell Zaynabou I can explain everything.”_

“I sincerely doubt that, Felix,” Ibrahim says, settling headset over hijab. “I very much do. Agent Barton, did I stutter?”

“No ma’am,” Clint says, and plucks the headset off Phil’s ear before Phil can swat him away. “C’mon, boss, you heard the chief.”

Phil relinquishes the command seat with a stifled groan as each separate vertebrae grinds back into place necessary for bipedal movement. As he turns and shuffles towards the stairs, his head starts to swim from the change in position after so many hours; Clint’s arm slides under his so smoothly he doesn’t even sway. They walk down the stairs and out of the room together.

“Thank you,” Phil says in the hall. “Really. But I don’t need an escort, I’m just tired.”

“Sure thing,” Clint says agreeably. “How about this: you check out for a couple hours on the couch, I get you herbal tea and an egg puck sandwich from the cafeteria when it opens, and _then_ you go home.”

It sounds much more appealing than going now, in the pre-dawn dark, just to spend a few more hours in an empty apartment full of furniture he didn’t pick and food he doesn’t like. Even with the threat of herbal tea. “What about bacon?”

“I heard Fury threatened Medical with 90 percent budget cuts if they didn’t find a way to keep your blood pressure down,” Clint says. “I’m already in the shit with them, I don’t need to be caught abetting a bacon run.”

“It’s hereditary _,”_ Phil grumbles, and when Clint grins he pinches the bridge of his nose to hide his own small smile. “I can’t promise anything, then.”

They arrive at the elevator bank, and Clint goes to press the button. “I can maybe do chicken sausage patties.”

“They have chicken sausage?”

“Patties,” Clint confirms. The elevator pings.  “Like eating cardboard fried in drippings. They’re great.”

Phil lets out a deep sigh. “I guess I’ll take the sandwich.”

“That’s the spirit, sir,” Clint says, and puts his hand back on Phil’s elbow to steer him into the elevator.


	4. 4

To say Phil has been going through a dry spell is to grossly understate both the duration and depth of his withdrawal from the dating scene. He says he’s busy and he says he can’t commit to a relationship when his teams and operations take up twenty four hours of every day, but the truth is that even before he reached Level Seven status the situation was objectively dire. Monks in the walled-in cells of Palekh had better love lives. The mutant bullshark, relocated from the Potomac to the marine biology labs in the Sandbox, has a better love life.  Fury, God knows how, has _grandchildren._

The point is, a little loneliness would go a long way towards explaining Phil’s growing fixation on the agent with the very nice dick.

Phil wakes up abruptly on Sunday afternoon, alone on the couch in his office with a cold breakfast sandwich and oversteeped chamomile tea on the floor next to him. The solid cylinder of egg is hiding small fragments of bacon underneath, though, so Phil forgives its temperature almost immediately and starts in, still flat on his back.

The duty phone buzzes again, probably the noise that woke him. It’s next to the couch, on top of a stack of unread cables from State that he’s been using as a coffee table. The actual coffee table, crammed in between the two chairs and the couch, is too covered in books, loose pages, and broken pieces of equipment to serve its original purpose. Phil struggles for a moment between finishing his sandwich and answering, but if last night taught them anything, it’s that the duty officer really can’t afford to skip a call. He keeps chewing as he grabs and holds the phone above his face, though, fingers leaving greasy smears on the screen.

The photo is… very close to perfect. White sheets and sun, a muscular male body with not a stitch on, half-hard against one thigh and a knee drawn up to frame it. There’s the small white scar on his thigh Phil recognizes from the first photo, the two moles under his navel from the second.

As tired as he is, Phil has a small, embarrassing moment where he’s lost in the fantasy of it. The idea of waking up next to someone and turning into their sleepwarm body, hand trailing slowly down their chest as he tilts up his chin for a kiss. Quiet laughter in a bright room.

The text says, _Thinking of you._

Phil looks at it until the screen dims. Then he sets the phone back down on the cables with deliberate care and swallows hard, looking at the sprinkler head protruding from the ceiling above.

“Shit,” he says to the empty room. He covers his face with an arm. “Shit, shit, _shit.”_

* * *

Phil finishes the sandwich on the short drive home, only to find a threatening message from Hill waiting in a grocery delivery bag on his doorstep. He decides that taking the leave she suggests is less trouble than ignoring the malevolence she’s managed to convey via healthy vegetables; he spends Monday at home, working surreptitiously from his Blackberry and looking up recipes for kale and squash.

Tuesday, his reward for sneaking back into the office is the reassessment request for Delta’s mission in Kaliningrad waiting at the top of his inbox. Phil is mentally exhausted enough to droop until his forehead is resting on his desk blotter, which is when Hill sticks her head in his office and says, “For the record, I’m angry you’re here but I need you to help represent senior staff at a surprise party for Eunice Mitchell.”

“Retirement?” Phil asks the blotter.

“She’s getting married. Undergrad at George Washington.”

“Jesus.”

“His name is Karter, with a K. He was interning in a neighboring office.”

“Jesus _Christ_.”

Insult to injury, Mitchell works in the nonproliferation division. The duty phone gets a new message while Phil is nursing a cheap and terrible beer and studiously avoiding eye contact with Agent Schlitz, and he’s almost glad to excuse himself and duck inside someone’s cubicle to check it. This time the photo is a sophomoric shot straight down the unknown agent’s pants; the man has cartoon flowers on his boxers. _Want to get out of here?_ the text reads, and Phil _recognizes_ that carpet in the background, he is _walking_ on that carpet in the background—

Hill finds him thirty minutes later in the office suite’s kitchen, sleeves rolled up and elbow deep in a sink full of dirty plasticware.

“Fuck, finally. I know you know how to socialize like a big boy, I shouldn’t have to...” She pauses. “What are you doing?”

Phil gestures with nonpro’s particularly grubby scrub-brush at the frothy water. “Just helping out a little.”

“Are you— are you washing the plastic plates?”

“No,” Phil says. He’s washing the plastic platters and serving utensils, which are sturdy enough to be used for another, future function. If a plastic cup or plate happens to make it into the soapy water, well, the office managers will thank him later for contributing to their cost-saving measures.

“Good, great, because _that would be crazy_ and I refuse to be the last one standing in this nuthouse,” Hill says, grabbing his arm.

“Wait,” Phil says, digging in his heels. “Wait, no, I can’t go out there. _Maria_ —”

She drags him out of the kitchen and doesn’t stop until she’s gotten them both another drink and forced him into a congratulatory circle with Mitchell, her child groom, and the Eurasia chiefs, all of whom seem mildly nonplussed to see Phil out of a jacket and two of whom could have theoretically just sent him a photo of their penis. One of them comments on how ‘relaxed’ he looks. Phil desperately wants to go back to the dishes.

“I can see your wrists,” May murmurs as she sidles up to the group in the middle of a truly excruciating honeymoon description, a plastic wine glass full of whiskey dangling from her fingers. “Feels a little scandalous, like I’m ogling Victorian ankle-bone.”

“I am absolutely certain I’m needed elsewhere,” Phil murmurs back, and as it turns out he’s absolutely correct. Sitwell has Sharon Carter cornered by the snack table and is mansplaining the Tunisian elections, and Phil barely notices in time to prevent manslaughter via ranch dip and baby carrots.

The next message arrives that night, late enough that the office outside his door has gone silent and the quiet hum of the HVAC has died away completely. He’s elbow-deep in the bounced mission review, vouchers for Delta’s increasingly questionable purchases littering every surface. His recovered suitjacket hangs over the back of his chair, and his sleeves are still rolled to the elbows. He’s tired from the little sleep and cheap beer, and a little numb from the horror of realizing he might need to invest in reading glasses, but if he doesn’t do this now he knows he’ll never find the time.

The duty phone buzzes, and he’s so deeply embedded in receipts for rotgut vodka that the noise takes a moment to penetrate through the dense Cyrillic print. When it does, he gives the phone a dubious look, but picks it up when it buzzes again and opens the waiting photo.

Phil is celibate by circumstance, not inclination, and he’ll admit to looking at certain of the photos he’s been sent longer than others. And it’s only natural that he’d linger on the photos of the few agents still  thumbing their nose at censure and stigma both. At this point, though, he’s been mostly desensitized to all but the most lurid of props and poses, especially after identifying so many of the perpetrators.

This one he stares at with unfeigned shock for three solid seconds before slamming the phone facedown on his desk.

“This is _harassment,”_ he says to the empty room, a prickly heat breaking out under his suit and rising with embarrassing speed to his face. “This is— it’s completely—”

Phil stops, realizes his breath is actually coming faster and tries to moderate it, exhaling slow and even. He hesitates, watching the unassuming black plastic of the Blackberry for several seconds before he reaches for it again.

It’s just as horribly, beautifully lewd as the first glance, the utterly obscene curl of the man’s spine allowing for a close-up of his dick swollen and hard against his belly, the smears of precome on his skin, one hand cupping his balls and beyond them his body stretched around the thick knuckles of two fingers. Phil is having trouble swallowing. The angle is strange, long and flat like the camera is on the bed with him; the man is sweating, muscles tensed like the position is hard to hold. There are boxers caught around his strong thighs, the same stupid cartoon pattern from that morning.

The phone buzzes, and a new message icon appears at the bottom of the screen. Phil stares at it, willing someone— anyone— to have mercy on him.

He doesn’t get it. _Sorry, had to try that one again,_ the text says, and now there are three fingers, the man’s other hand caught in the motion of stroking his dick, the ruddy, needy flush of it absolutely mouthwatering—

Phil closes the new photo. He sets the phone aside. He goes back to the expense reports, labors over them for another hour, drafts a balance sheet enumerating exactly how much is going to be taken out of Delta’s weapons budget to replace the knives and explosive arrowheads they’d used for gambling chips, locks his safe, goes home, goes to bed, and after several minutes of telling himself he’s not going to, he opens the duty phone back to that last message and jerks himself off with a mingled sense of outrage and hot, helpless lust.

It’s a really, really nice dick.

No one has to know.

* * *

“That is a _beautiful_ cock,” Hand says, huddled close to better see the photos. “I don’t even like cock, and I can tell that’s prime beef.”

“Isn’t it?” Phil exclaims, gesturing with the phone. Hill’s mountain-bear rock fuckers had sounded like an incredibly bad idea at first, but they’ve certainly proven efficient. If there’s one thing he can appreciate in a mixed drink, it’s efficiency. “I mean, it’s gorgeous.”

”Nice and fat,” May is musing to herself. “Love it when they arch like that. G-spot _magnet_.”

“He’s a natural blond,” Hill coos. “I love blonds.”

“I w’s a blond,” Blake slurs, well into his nth refill from the margarita pitcher. He makes a gesture that would get him shot in Yemen and here makes the college girls eye him with prurient interest. “Once ’on a time. Now’m grey as shit, but ’sides, issnot th’ _boat_ , issa _motion_ of th’ _ocean_.”

“He’s got a point,” Hand says, chin resting on her palm. “Still. Best-looking cock I’ve seen in a long time.”

“I know,” Phil says dejectedly.

“You can’t trace the number at all?”

“I wasn’t able to trace any of them directly,” he says. “The metadata’s all wiped. Not a single stray geotag.”

“It’s almost like we train our agents to completely erase all identifying information from their communications,” May says. “Oh, wait.”

Phil sighs gustily and takes the shot Hill passes him.

“We could hold a surprise decontamination drill at headquarters,” Hand muses, tapping her lip with a finger. “Those are always educational.”

“We could release the clothes-eating superfungus they found on the outside of that one moon lander,” May suggests. “With the double benefit of it eating clothes and creating a real decontamination situation.”

The phone buzzes in Phil’s hand.

“Dick,” Hill predicts.

“Vag,” Blake says, without any particular optimism.

“Damn it all to hell,” Phil groans, and hits accept.

Hand leans in closer. “Is it the same guy _again_?”

“ _‘Having fun tonight?’_ ” Hill reads off the screen. “Well, that’s ballsy. Pun absolutely intended.”

**Author's Note:**

>   1. [Long Island Ice Teas](https://www.thespruce.com/long-island-iced-tea-and-variations-759315) \- basically all the alcohols (+ an eighth of an inch of soda if you’re lucky)
>   2. Abottobad - where they found Osama bin Laden in 2011
>   3. [Rocky Mountain Bear Fucker](http://www.drinksmixer.com/drink606.html) shots - one part tequila, one part whiskey, and one part peach liqueur. Yum, yum
>   4. Kaishakunin - the one that does the mercy beheading in seppuku/harakiri (samurai ritual suicide)
>   5. Nonpro/nonproliferation - as in stopping the spread of nuclear materials or other components that could be used to make/deliver WMDs
>   6. Stuttgart - where [U.S. AFRICOM](http://www.africom.mil/about-the-command) is based
>   7. Altier - means haughty or tall in French, which I did not know/remember until I looked it up (you go French minor, always showing up in weird places)
>   8. [Schlitz](http://schlitzbrewing.com) \- I amuse myself so much
> 



End file.
